Strangely enough there's in those few millions there's enough people to have interesting conversations with. ~12 million is larger than population of quite a few countries, where people still manage to have social lives somehow. With just a relatively small amount of followers you'll have engaging conversations on Mastodon/Fediverse. While on Twitter/Birdsite the engagement, unless you are an influencer, is surprisingly low and responses are very low-quality in my experience. But YMMV of course.
You are right. I was off by few million, according to below stats counter. Note that any count is an estimation due to the decentralized nature of the network and instances not counted. I've seen other higher numbers too.
I think you are 10 million off, since the monthly active users shows who is actively using the platform on a monthly basis, not total registrations.
If I was to bring up Twitter's total registered users to date, it would be close to the billions. That doesn't mean there are billions of users using it monthly, this is why total registered users as a metric is irrelevant.
Twitter's DAUs are in the hundreds of millions (over 220M+). Since that is the case it is clear that the MAUs are even higher. Mastodon's 7 years of existence vs Twitter's 7 years of existence is not even close and is no contest, with Twitter at 90M+ daily active users at the time.
The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it.
Mastodon is social media, but it is not a product. While indeed no one wants to be on dead social media, Mastodon is perfectly fine at a "stable condition". If your friends are on it, why would you leave?
for a product with angry VCs breathing down your neck, yes. For a protocol/ecosystem run without profit motive? Not really. IRC has existed for how many decades now? And of course those stats are misleadingly timed given that it's up about 3x compared to a year ago.
> Why would I spend time on a social network where few of the people I know or interested in are present?
Heard this argument more often. I find this a strange perspective. Say that you are living in a country with the same amount of population as the Fediverse has. Would you say generally speaking it is hard to get to know people you are interested in? Of course for niche interest areas mass networks help find a larger group. But among millions there's quite a few people to have nice engagements with already.
I'm probably too old, but I seldom get to know people on social networks. More often I know them from my offline life, or know their books or software they created, and use social networks to connect with them. When I do learn new people on social networks, it's through other people I already know.
I don't have a Twitter account though, so my usage patterns might not be relevant.
It depends on what you are interested in of course; but let’s say one has an interest in politics, society, culture, world affairs, etc: a lot of recent growth in Mastodon seems to be due to progressive-leaning people abandoning Twitter because they don’t like Musk’s politics/personality/antics; meanwhile, most conservative-leaning and very many moderate/centrist/apolitical people haven’t bothered. Not only haven’t they bothered, I think the impression many people get of Mastodon (fairly or unfairly) is that it is a hyper-progressive space, and if someone is more moderate-to-conservative, or even just interested in experiencing ideological diversity, jumping ship from Twitter to Mastodon would be a waste of their time.
This is nothing about the far-right as such; Musk has allowed neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin back on Twitter, but I doubt anyone is going to encounter their content unless they are actively looking for it. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of mainstream centrists-to-conservatives, and even what one might call “dissident progressives” (who criticise mainstream progressivism from the Left-e.g. the classical Marxist who condemns “wokeness” as a capitalist plot to divide and distract the working class), who are happy to maintain a presence on Twitter but don’t feel like Mastodon would be a very welcoming place for them.
Like Twitter-and unlike Mastodon (or at least how it appears from the outside-I am going by its reputation, not personal experiences with it)-this site has a great deal of ideological diversity, from the far-left to the far-right, although my impression is the majority of users skew centre-left. Most of Reddit’s big subs are dominated by mainstream American progressivism, but niche subs contain a much wider diversity of viewpoints and ideologies. That said, dang is much more reasonable than Reddit’s admins, and while Reddit’s admins can at times be arbitrary and capricious, many believe that capriciousness has a political slant to it
for the same reason you're talking to me here on HN right now. Because a personal community of a 1000 people you vibe with is better than an entropy machine of 100 million. Can you even call something a social network if it makes the people on it anti-social?
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
> > The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
> > Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
> > So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
> where few of the people I know or interested in are present?
They never said larger, and yes, more is not always better. There are simply more interesting people I want to hear from on HN than on Reddit. But this is also true in my case for Twitter over Mastodon and is one reason why I stopped using Mastodon.
Fediverse isn't VC funded and isn't a 'product' in the sense that Twitter is. Obsession with eternal growth is a function of the funding model. Those putting money or time into this are not looking for a financial return - they are trying to sustain a public service.
2023-04-15: Active Users 1199771
2023-03-15: Active Users 1247487